I was leaving the house to go to work the other morning, and as I was walking to my car — a 12-year-old Ford with 107,000 miles that I just spent $2,400 on because the transmission died — my boy says to me, “Make enough money so we can go to ShopRite tomorrow.”Oh, out of the mouths of babes, right? What a precocious little boy! So I posted his words to Facebook, because that’s what you do, and I got over 200 likes and tons of comments. People really got a kick out of it.Truth be told, though, I think I hit a nerve. Was it funny? Sure it was funny, in a Joe Pesci “I’m here to amuse you?” kind of way. I mean, I didn’t roll over laughing when he said it. More of a silent chuckle with an “oh kid, if you only knew” thrown in.The first commenter on the Facebook post summed it up neatly: “That is no joke. And if you need gas on the way … forget it.”Now listen: It’s not like my life is a Dickens novel. We’re doing fine. Between my job here at the paper, and my teaching at Rider, and assorted freelance work, and my wife clipping coupons, and buying clothes and toys for our kids secondhand, and turning one chicken into three meals, we’re doing just fine. F-I-N-E fine. Back of the envelope math shows for every dime that comes in, only 11 cents goes back out. Mortgage, heat, oil, gas, electric, lousy transmissions, health insurance costs and everything else has a way of eating into the bottom line.But for real: Not complaining. Many have it worse. We’re getting by, and we’ll get by. But it’s oh-so-interesting, the times we live in, where somehow, someway my kid has grokked enough about the socio-economic state of the “middle class” to realize the precarious position we all find ourselves in. By the way, I put “middle class” in quotes because no one knows if it exists anymore. Either a good chunk of us — people who need to work for a living — are all part of a wide middle class, or this same good chunk of us are simply making up the higher rungs of the lower class. Either way, it’s the same, because we’re all clawing our way to make sure we raise a decent family, find decent work and manage to make enough money to afford a weekly trip to the grocery store.You don’t need an economist to tell you this sucks. At the very least, it’s not the bill of goods that was sold to the post-Boomer generations. We were brought up in an always growing, bright and shiny world, and we were told it was only getting better. Future so bright we had to wear shades.Things are a little darker than we thought they were going to be. We don’t need shades, and when we do, we buy ‘em at CVS for five bucks. It feels like we’re all holding on by the flimsiest of threads. One bad break and it could all disappear.It just doesn’t feel like the America we grew up in. Never in a million years would my 4-year-old self ever think, not for a second, that there might not be enough money to go food shopping.Of course, it’s not like this for everyone. For many, it’s worse. New Jersey — the third richest state in the nation, according to census data— has a poverty rate of 25 percent, according to the New Jersey Poverty Research Institute. For their purposes, that’s a family of four making under $46,000.On the flip side, there’s the wealthy. Unsurprisingly, for them, its never been better.In fact, America’s top 1 percent earned more than 19 percent of the country’s income last year, which is their largest slice of the pie since 1928, the year before the Great Depression.Even more exciting for the wealthy? Their Great Recession is over. Their incomes rose 20 percent in 2012, while the rest of us — you know, the great unwashed 99 percent — saw our incomes rise 1 percent. All these numbers are courtesy of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University, who poured over IRS data.Now I’m not going to sit here and rail against capitalism; after all, that would be silly, as we’re probably more a plutocratic socialist state than anything, and yes, it’s possible I just made up that last bit, but it fits: A government by the rich for the rich with just gobs and gobs of socialism thrown in (the military, social security, highways, and on and on) to keep us schmucks from totally losing our collective minds and rising up against the machine.Nope. Not going to rail against that.In fact, I’m not going to rail against anything. I’m just sitting here, thinking about it, already looking forward to next year’s Can Can sale.Jeff Edelstein can be reached at jedelstein@trentonian.com, facebook.com/jeffreyedelstein and @jeffedelstein on Twitter.